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Calling America Bluff On Online Gambling

No issue reveals the talents of America for self-deception, as online gambling.

To convince ourselves that we can keep this sin under control, we absorbed a casino in isolated places like Las Vegas and Atlantic City, reachable only by highway, and some of their ships on the river, where there is no single map can be considered or slot, pulled the lever, until the ship left the dock.

In Mississippi, the law would say you could not in the casino, if it was floating on the water. After Hurricane Katrina forced to move some of these sins of the barge to the ground, the Legislative Assembly, the reading of the disaster as a sign from God, the revised law to allow them to remain in place. (River State, likewise, in eventually allowed its floating casinos to remain dockside). In addition, there are Indian tribes, which have fewer members than their rolls of slot machines in their multimillion-dollar casino. This brings us to the online gambling business on the Internet.

Barney Frank (D-Mass.) and Sen. Robert Menendez (DN.J.) and have introduced a bill in Congress to lift the federal ban on many online games, and clarify the law, which is even gloomier than for a physical casino, if possible. Their goals include taking some action to the U.S. Treasury for a political principle that the sins always seem to be less dangerous when there is money to be under pressure from them. Consulting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers estimated in 2007 that legalization can bring as much as $43 billion in tax revenue over 10 years, unless it involves sports betting, $34 billion, even if it does not.

Another incentive is that the new Federal Reserve and Treasury Department rules that require banks and other financial institutions to block the transfer of gaming will come into force on 1 December, and the banks screamed bloody murder about the additional regulatory burden.

Internet online gambling is one of those questions that shed light on the distribution of juice in Washington.

The lifting of the bill delight casino companies, such as entertainment Harrah’s, which want to expand their thriving business online poker and spent about $1 million this year alone to lobby for the legalization of Congressfor. But they also leave intact the ban on online sports betting, who like to wear, as the National Football League, no slouch in the game of lobbying by Washington.

It is fair to say that the American approach to online gambling on the Internet, which is legal in much of the rest of the world, is absurd. (Indeed, the U.S. federal ban on Dutch international trading partners that host online gambling companies, which complained to the World Trade Organization that it violates trade agreements signed by the United States.) State laws are wildly inconsistent, and sometimes excessive and hypocritical. “The Martians would be hard to understand that if you play online poker for money in Washington state, you are committing a Class C felony, Joseph M. Kelly, a online gambling law expert of the State University of Buffalo in New York told me. “It’s just like rape.

Government Accountability Office, identify the legal landscape in 2002, showed that five states specifically prohibited from online gambling on the Internet: Illinois, Oregon, South Dakota, Nevada and Louisiana. (Washington, passed the ban in 2006.) Online gambling in casinos physical institutionalized in each.

At the federal level, conservatives in Congress slipped ban online gambling on the Internet in the book in 2006, quietly attaching it to the anti-terrorism bill, no reasonable legislator can resist.

That federal law, illegal internet online gambling enforcement of the law has many flaws. He saddles financial institutions with the responsibility of bodies, preventing them from “knowingly accepting payments” comes from “unlawful Internet online gambling.” But it does not define what is illegal.

It frees fantasy sports and the “skill” games, for example. But where does that leave the most popular online poker games? The new rules seem to prohibit the game, although her fans argue that this is a game of skill pitting player against player. They say it was rushed into the on-line gambling ban on the poor control of the drafting process.

“This law and these rules are simply fraud,” said Howard Lederer, world-class poker player on the board of the Alliance of poker players, a group of Washington, which claims 1.2 million members. “People who have a moral agenda wrote the laws and rules that were vague. And the banks, which have a sword of Damocles hanging over their heads and there is no clarity is likely to block the poker deals.”

As for other games, the Ministry of Justice based its position that all Internet on-line gambling is illegal in the 1961 Wire Act, which prohibits the use of telecommunications services to bid. However, federal courts have confirmed the Wire Act prosecution for sports betting alone, leaving uncertain other online games actually illegal under federal law.

Banks and issuers of credit cards are not happy about the on-screen billions of financial transactions on the grounds they were gambling-related, starting a few weeks. Officer of the American Bankers Assn. Congress said last year that the proposed rule “has no practical prospects of success” in carrying out the apparent justification of the 2006 Act, which is to combat money laundering.

Kelly believes that may have the opposite effect. “You decrease credible payment systems and replace them with those who did not leave the paper,” he says.

It’s not as if the federal ban could destroy online play any more than Prohibition destroyed drinking water. It simply deprives the players of protection of US-controlled environments. Internet gambling sites are usually governed by their home countries – Britain, Ireland and the Caribbean such as Antigua among them – but it is far to go for redress.

“If a player feels cheated, he would stop playing to the site,” said John Pappas, executive director of the Alliance of poker players, but without U.S. supervision, he can not sue in American courts. ” Frank and the Menendez bill would require sites serving players from the U.S. to take the legal jurisdiction of the United States in exchange for licensing.

Of course online gambling on the Internet has its risks, including the prospects of addictive play and the involvement of minors. But banning the pastime force these issues into the shadows, where they are harder to address and makes it impossible to attract the industry to help fight with them.

It is doubtful that Congress will act to postpone the new rules, especially in view of more pressing issues on his plate. But next year is not too fast, so he re lesson every attempt to enforce morality that most people do not share. If you can not eradicate, control – and take a big chunk of the wages of sin, when you’re at it.